Basic Shapes

There are a couple of ways to create shapes with Photoshop, with newer versions offering a dedicated shape tool. Even using this howver it's still useful to do things the old fashioned way as it ultimately allows for greater control over your shapes.

1) Start by selecting the marquee tool choosing either the rectangular or elliptical tool. The box pops up when the right mouse button is clicked over the tool bar button.

2) On the blank page draw the shape you want. Don't worry if it isn't exactly right, it can always be changed later on.

Here we can see the marquee tool being used to draw a rectangular box. This is sometimes called the marching ants.

3) Once we have drawn our outline we have the choice of either drawing a line around it (called Stroking) or completely filling it with a colour. To do these go up to Edit > Fill or Stroke. You can then choose a colour for your fill or a width of the stroke line. Click Ok to finish drawing your shape.

Stroking the selection produces an outine.	Filling the selection.

4) If you Fill there are additional optional allowing the shape to be filled with a predefined pattern. Try out some of the default patterns and later on you can create some of your own.